Our Grow-Make-Eat! session started off today with a spot of detective work… what needs to be done in the garden? “Watering!”, as usual, since it’s been a dry and warm couple of days; “Weeding!” well spotted, there are a few things in the beds that we didn’t sow or plant! Some potatoes and watercress we missed from last year’s crop had sprouted so we pulled those up to make room for the plants we’re looking after this term.

We thinned out the carrots and put the strongest plants into a tub full of sandy compost. We learnt about how the carrots grow bigger in sandy soil as they are the roots of the plant, and the roots stretch out to search for more nutrition. If we planted them in rich compost they’d be happy where they are and stay small and stumpy!

What had changed in the garden since last week? The wildflowers are getting even bigger and look like they’re about to burst into flower any moment now! The cabbage had bolted (bad news!) and had sprouted an enormous stalk of pretty yellow flowers! But hang on, where did those pretty broad bean flowers go? Zofia knowledgeably suggested that they had turned into beans. We looked carefully and there the young bean pods were! All very exciting, hopefully we can eat them in the next couple of weeks.

We also planted some Charlotte potatoes, which will be great in salads. Some interesting reactions when planting them in; “The sprouts are disgusting!” and “They look like babies!” Hopefully they’ll look more appetizing once they’ve grown new tubers…

In the kitchen we made some raw balls as the kids had really made such a great effort with all our weird concoctions of late. Moving away from chocolate and indeed our popular flapjack balls we decided to try a peanut butter and banana ball. Now I mustn’t forget to write the ingredients because for some reason the children LOVED these!

Before we made them we had little chat about palm oil and deforestation due the fact we had sustainable palm oil in our Whole Earth peanut butter. Encouraging children to read labels and lead their own investigations about what they eat is very important.

So as always we blend the hard ingredients first. We have a Magi Mix at school but any food processor will do. So this time it was cashew and dried bananas first then all the rest till blended and the dates are pureed. We left some bananas a bit chunky.

Ingredients:

A pack of unsalted cashews (or a nut like almond)

A pack of dried bananas (We like these fair-trade sulphur free ones)

A table spoon of peanut butter (the good stuff ideally)

A handful of pitted dates

Some raisins

A small squeeze of agave syrup or honey

A sprinkle of cinnamon

We used coconut oil but I would omit it next time as it all came out too greasy!